‘Wingers W/O Dictionaries

Today’s my first day back at TPM. And when I woke up this morning, I saw (h/t) this piece in the American Spectator opening a new front in the attack on Shirley Sherrod. It turns out, says Jeffrey Lord, whose bio lists him as “former Reagan White House political director”, that for all our thought that Sherrod was a victim of a smear, she’s actually a terrible liar after all. Her story about a relative being lynched by a white sheriff almost 70 years ago, Lord reveals, is a terrible lie.This one’s really one for the history books under the subheading of right-wing #outragefail, as the young folks might put it. Lord starts off vaguely sympathetic and works up into a crescendo of high-dudgeon because Sherrod says her relative was lynched when in fact he was arrested by a sheriff and then beaten to death on the courthouse steps while allegedly resisting arrest even though he remained handcuffed through the fatal beating.

As Lord points out, the man in question, Bobby Hall, was not hanged but rather beaten to death. Needless to say, Lord goes through the whole article apparently blissfully ignorant that he doesn’t know the definition of the word ‘lynch’, which refers to extra-judicial killings but doesn’t necessarily refer to hanging.

If the underlying story weren’t so ugly and awful, Lord’s militant ignorance would be funny. And in fact, he makes such a fool of himself, that all the ugliness and awfulness aside, it’s still pretty funny. It would seem the new ‘civil rights movement’ of angry white people resisting the racial oppression of the folks who actually were the Civil Rights Movement is just fated to embarrassment after embarrassment. Which probably seems ironic for anyone not living on this planet.